


traces of that other place

by hondayota



Series: the lucky ones [5]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, Pre-Series, mini henrietta, this is just some adam and gansey bonding, vague abuse references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 05:45:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8610982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hondayota/pseuds/hondayota
Summary: (Awesome! And ya, it's a busy time of year so I understand!) Could you write about Gansey and Adam hanging out in Monmouth and Adam asks Gansey about why he started and continues to spend so much time on the mini-Henrietta? Just any Adam and Gansey bonding really :)





	

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoy!! hmu on tumblr @ pygmytyrants
> 
> title is from diplomat's son by vampire weekend

“Adam,” Gansey asked, “where do you live?”

Adam’s heart stuttered in his chest. He pressed a hand to the tender bruises beneath his worn uniform shirt, tried to take a deep breath. Gansey gazed at him through dark eyelashes, a slice of pizza balanced on his knee. Adam tightened his grip on his soda can, grounding himself in the coolness of the metal. 

“I,” he began, mind swarming with every worst-case scenario, every pitying look anyone had ever given his response. Tell him and he’ll leave you, his father taunted, tell him and he’ll know you’re nothing. Adam blew out breath through his nose. “Why does it matter?” 

Gansey peered at him strangely, eyes observant through his wire-frames. Adam had never seen those glasses before, and he felt he liked the Gansey that came with them: softer, yet more in focus, as though Adam had taken a photograph and Gansey had come out clear while everything else blurred. This was a private Gansey, this prince with pizza grease dripping down his leg and forgotten notebooks spread before him. “It doesn’t, really,” Gansey said. “I was hoping to add you to Henrietta.”

For a moment, Adam wondered how Gansey knew, after barely weeks of friendship, how out of place Adam felt here, how even his bones ached to leave. Then Gansey gestured widely to a sheet-covered corner of Monmouth Adam had so far dismissed as Glendower research. Gansey pulled the sheet from the ground with a flourish, visibly excited to reveal what lay beneath. 

“This is the Barns,” Gansey murmured. The movie he had put on as background noise had faded to black, but neither boy had noticed. Adam had spent upwards of an hour admiring Gansey’s handcrafted buildings, walking himself past Aglionby, Nino’s, the church he knew Ronan attended every Sunday. Henrietta looked much nicer like this, he thought, when he loomed over it rather than the other way around. Gansey answered Adam’s questions with quiet enthusiasm, full of stories for each location. 

“Ronan’s Barns? I thought they were in Singer’s Falls, not here.” 

“They are. But they’re also a part of Ronan, and Ronan,” Gansey said, pausing, “Ronan is part of this.” Gansey swept his arms over Mini-Henrietta in a grand gesture, circling to include himself and Adam in this. “He brings me the pieces himself. The miniature cows and hay bales. I don’t know where he gets them.” 

Adam laughed softly, imaging Ronan, clothed in black and a scowl, fashioning tiny bales of hay. He took in the detail of Mini-Henrietta again, the lives spiraling out from the town center, and he could see Gansey, impossibly intertwined with it all. He wanted to fit somewhere like that. Unlikely as it was, he wanted to fit with Gansey and Ronan like that, be tangled spiderwebs around each other. He wanted to be his own man, but he thought now he might want friends by his side. “I live here,” Adam told Gansey, brushing freckled fingers over the empty space where the trailer park should be. “The trailer park, here.” 

Gansey looked at Adam again, followed the line of his hands to the piece of Adam’s life that had just been laid bare. Adam felt as though he had pulled out a central vein and was bleeding over Gansey’s floor, and Gansey said nothing. Adam watched him take in the furrow of Adam’s eyebrows, the slight tremor of his arm, the holes in his Aglionby uniform. 

Finally, Gansey said: “Where would you like me to put you?” 

“What?” 

“I don’t…have to put you where your physical house is. Ronan is here, the Barns is there. The Barns is a part of Ronan, but it doesn’t have to be the same for you. I started building Mini-Henrietta because I can’t sleep, and I keep building because Henrietta speaks to me. It makes me feel more than I am. Where can I put you to make you feel more than you think you are?”

Adam had the vague sense that he wanted to cry, and the sudden awareness that by befriending Gansey he had inadvertently become a part of something. He didn’t know what. Adam swallowed the lump in his throat and let his hands ghost over areas of Mini-Henrietta, showing Gansey the places to make up Adam.


End file.
